How much can I earn as a guitar teacher?

‘How much can I earn as a guitar teacher’ is an important question for anyone that is serious about how to make a living as a guitar teacher.

The exact numbers depend on a number of factors including: what country you live in, the local economy, how urban your area is, etc. It’s obviously easier for a guitar teacher to acquire guitar students in a city than in an isolated village.

A guitar teacher’s hourly rate

In the USA and UK, a guitar teacher’s hourly rate is typically somewhere between $40-80 and £30-50 respectively. The upper end of these rates will tend to be that of guitar teachers that live in cities, and who have probably already built up solid reputations.

So that’s how much you can expect to earn as a guitar teacher per hour. On to the bigger question…

How much can a guitar teacher make per week

To some degree, how much you make per week depends on you. There’s an obvious restriction, however, in that most people work during the day. This means that most people looking for a guitar teacher will need to take guitar lessons in the evening.

The number of evening hours you have available to teach guitar in is limited so this needs to be taken into account.

Let’s optimistically assume that you can teach 4 hours back-to-back in the evening, on each weekday, from 5.30-9.30pm. That’s potentially 20 hours of teaching guitar per week.

How much money can a guitar teacher make, teaching at the weekend too?

Teaching at the weekend can make a big difference to how much money you can make. In theory there’s certainly another 10 hours of guitar teaching time available.

Of course, working seven days a week isn’t sustainable. And there’s also more to life than just work!

You might choose to teach guitar on Saturday mornings, say from 9.30am-12.30pm.

You could reserve these slots for the people that don’t want guitar lessons in the evenings. This shouldn’t interfere too much with your Saturday night gigs and it could make the difference between turning someone away, and gaining a new long-term guitar student.

Total weekly earnings as a guitar teacher

So, all of the above makes a total of 23 hours per week. If we assume a rate of say $50 per hour, that’s potentially $1,150 per week. That’s a pretty respectable income for a freelance guitar teacher.

You get every weekday off until 5.30pm and this doesn’t take account of any performance work you might do in addition to teaching guitar.

Be positive but realistic about how much you can make as a guitar teacher

As with any business venture, it’s easy to get carried away with overly optimistic projections about how much you can earn.

There are many factors that might prevent you from ever completely filling every one of those time-slots.

Not everyone will take a guitar lesson every week. Friday night may prove unpopular for guitar tuition as it’s the last working day of the week for most people. Some people will occasionally cancel their guitar lesson because of other commitments. You will sometimes need to take time off, etc.

You really can get a good income from teaching gutiar

Despite these last reservations, you should still find these numbers very encouraging. You really do have the potential to make a very good living as a guitar teacher. You just need to take being a guitar teacher seriously, work at giving high quality guitar lessons and retain your guitar students,

If your guitar teaching proves very popular, you could consider increasing your rate. You can then recalculate your potential earnings.

Conclusion

How much can I earn as a guitar teacher? Well probably more than if you were only a working guitarist.

Making a living as a performing guitarist alone is hard. Earning a living as a guitar teacher, however, is potentially a very good and reliable option. It can make up a part of your income, or it could be you complete way to earn a living.

If you haven’t already checked it out, you can learn everything I’ve learned about how to make a living as a guitar teacher with my complete course ‘Be A Guitar Teacher‘. You can try it for up to 12 months. If you anything less than 100% delighted with it then just email me and I’ll refund your payment.

Guitar teaching for a living gives you a good degree of control over your income, the hours you work and your long-term earning power. How far you take things is up to you…

Stuart Bahn

Stuart Bahn is a professional guitar teacher in London, and creator of the Be A Guitar Teacher video course.